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Another article on google adsense worries

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mouser:
tell me/us more about it..
we're always willing to be test pilots.

app103:
Google is actually doing something about spam blogs that exist solely for the displaying of Google ads and to encourage the clicking of them on Blogger.com/Blogspot. (They own Blogger)

I have a news related blog specifically for one topic which includes a short snip of the news articles I find related to the subject and a link to the original.

The purpose is to give readers a way to communicate with each other and discuss these articles when a news site doesn't give them the same opportunity to leave a comment. Most news sites don't allow a discussion to take place. I started it after a series of news stories painted a horrific picture that made me want to scream and none of the news sites with these articles gave me an opportunity to speak out and correct their misinformation. I found out I wasn't alone...there were more with a need to vent some steam about what they were reading.

This blog was flagged by Google as a 'spam blog'.

This meant at first that I would have to enter a code in order to make a post to it, to verify that a human was actually making these posts and that it wasn't something automated.

Eventually they froze my blog to prevent me from making any posts and told me I would either have to move it off Blogspot or ask for them to have a human review it and approve it before I would be allowed to post to it again.

The blog was only 2 weeks old when my trouble with Google started. The blog didn't have any Google ads on it at all. I didn't want anybody's ads there, as the subject of the ads related to the topic of my blog that they would have placed there would have sent people to some place where I didn't want my readers to go. Some place where something that is supposed to be free was being sold to those that were ignorant to that fact. It could have led to my readers being ripped off by leech-like opportunists.

Despite a lack of ads, Google did make an effort to put a stop to what it thought was a 'spam blog'.

Now what exactly qualifies as a 'spam blog' in their eyes? One that contains a large amount of outgoing links, and content duplication. The 2-3 sentence intros to the articles were considered by Google to be content duplication. Blogs are flagged as spam by an automated process, and once identified as spam, it can't be reversed unless the owner of the blog requests a review by a human, which could take awhile. Take this as a warning if you quote articles and link to the originals in your blog...do it too many times and yours will be a 'spam blog' too.

So Google is trying to do something about what they think qualifies as abuse. At least on servers they have control over.

I also know of at least 1 case of a forum owner being denied proper payment by Google for clicks by users of his forum, after a sudden dramatic increase in clicking that resulted from an extreme surge in membership and activity at his forum. An event last September sent millions to his forum looking for tech support. The ads that Google displayed on his forum promised miracles and an easy solution to the issues that brought them to his forum. People clicked and were ripped off by leeches. Then Google accused the forum owner of click fraud and would only pay him based on an average number of clicks he had in the past. Sometimes it doesn't pay to become popular.

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